After Huami, another Xiaomi partner IPOs within one year

After smart band maker Huami, another Xiaomi partner completed its IPO within just one year. Chinese smart home product maker Viomi (云米) landed on Nasdaq September 25 pricing its stocks on the lower end at $9 per share.

Viomi’s shares closed at $9.08 at the first day allowing the company to raise around $103 million through its IPO.

Founded in 2014, the company offers IoT products and smart home appliances which can be controlled not only through an app but also by voice command. The company developed its own smart control platform IoT@Home which has attracted 1.2 million users by the end of June 2018.

A popular product among its 40 product lines is a smart water purifier which made more than 40% of Viomi’s net revenues in the first half of 2018. The company also holds around 1000 patents.

Xiaomi not only supports startups within its ecosystem financially but also helps them to the position in the market. The smartphone maker even has its own crowdfunding platform. This, however, has cast doubt on whether these startups can thrive on their own.

Much like with Huami that debuted on the NYSE in February, one concern for the market is Viomi’s dependence on Xiaomi. Some Viomi investors are also Xiaomi’s including Sequoia Capital. Viomi’s cooperation with Xiaomi is due until December 2018, with no automatic renewal provision.

The company stressed that they would try their best to retain the cooperation with Xiaomi, and warned that any shift in the Viomi-Xiaomi relationship may result in material changes. Chen Xiaoping, founder and CEO at Viomi, thanked Xiaomi’s Lei Jun on the day of the IPO. The company’s net revenues from sales to Xiaomi in 2017 was RMB739.5 million, while the figure for the first half of this year is RMB651.5 million already.

The company said for the first half of 2018, Viomi’s net sales revenue hit RMB 1 billion ($160 million), up 284.4% increase compared to the same period in 2017. Viomi’s net profit for the first half of this year surpassed RMB 70 million, but the company still hopes to use the money the IPO raised to fill the hole of a cash loss of around RMB 18 million made during the same period.

“[The IPO would be] a big alleviation [of current fiscal pressure],” as local media Tencent Tech quoted Guo Meide (in Chinese), vice president at All View Cloud, a cloud-based big data solution provider specializing in the smart home sector.